When Hermann Kinder entered the literary stage, he had already rushed through the group dynamic 1970s, he, the doctorate in German and Academic Council (“Mittelbauer”, children once called himself self-deprecatingly) at the then still very fresh University of Konstanz. “Der Schleiftrog”, Kind’s debut, was formally an educational novel in the style of the time. It was important to kick off the father generation with a kick, to affirm political commitment and to criticize the university as an educational factory. But the way Hermann Kinder tells this story of the young man from Münster, who first tastes the taste of freedom in boarding school and then almost fails because of his own standards at university, but even more because of those of the others, is so dry and funny that you can hear the story still reads with pleasure today.
The overwhelming demands of that generation, children born in 1944, who had to put together their own identity with the educational assets of their fathers, has seldom been described as precisely and grimly funny as in the “Schleiftrog”. Making politics was a duty, preferably on the grassroots. The narrator, already exhausted by the complex philology, is therefore obliged to dig deeper into the issues of the SPD local group Uppenberg in addition to Grimmelshausen and phonetic shifting. Above all, that means drinking schnapps and beer until the belief in the changeability of society drifts away. “And I always find what I have been thinking about, written down somewhere else for a long time and better. And I’m still with Hegel.”
“The grinding trough” made children a successful writer. The Diogenes publishing house in Zurich counted him among its in-house authors, with “Der helle Wahn” and “Vom Schweinemut der Zeit”, children wrote themselves into the ranks of the educated sarcastic storytellers of those years. These soon published in the new Haffmans publishing house, where children also ended up with his books. Anyone who studied in the late 1980s knows: in the seminar you had to worship the rainbow colors of Edition Suhrkamp, but in the cafeteria you read the Haffmans books by Eckhard Henscheid, Robert Gernhardt and Julian Barnes. These were the years in which authors and publishers were still so self-deprecated and chutzpah that they also printed tears on the flap covers of their books. Because children will have agreed that on the back of the paperback edition of his really comical Germanist novella “Kina Kina” stood the critic’s sigh: “Why didn’t the pitiful long-nose stay in Konstanz?”
The criticism had been rude to him, he was popular with his students
With the negative quote, children may also want to document that the criticism was quite rude with his novels and stories for a while. He saw himself as a victim of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the essay “Pigs-Gang” reports bitterly about his alleged, ultimately successful attempt to ban him from the public perception as a writer. Children stayed at the university without making a career there, was very popular with students and spiced up his science as the editor of testimonies to the sad love of the poet Gottfried August Bürger for Elise Hahn as well as through the great anthology “The classic sow”, in the Men like Gleim, Voss and Goethe are presented as pornographers.
Child’s radically subjective narrative style, trained in the paradigms of the new inwardness, benefits again his late work, which has found a new home at Weissbooks. Relentlessly and practiced in the technique of self-accusation, children told about aging and dying. In one of his last books, “The Way of All Flesh”, he describes his sudden illness. It was followed by a rapid physical decline, the grotesque details of which children portray so precisely and unsentimentally that reading is frightening – because one has to laugh out loud.
His poetology has repeatedly revolved around children in essays and speeches: whoever writes tries to correct a defect. Hermann Kinder was an extremely clever and scrupulous narrator who knew both the infernal joke and the jeremiad. His life on the edge of success and business may have worried him, but it has secured him narrative sovereignty and literary incorruptibility. Children knew that literature is not a competition in which the supposedly best win, but a constant search for self-assurance. “Every text is the abolition of the writing ego”, Kinder once wrote, “it preserves it and makes it disappear.” Hermann Kinder has now died in Konstanz at the age of 77.